The following discussion of the background art is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention only. It should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgement or admission that any of the material referred to was part of the common general knowledge as at the priority date of the application.
In one area of activity involving the restraint of persons where the invention has particular, but not exclusive, utility, there is increasing awareness of the importance of safety for persons where a latching mechanism is relied upon for restraining a person to an object such as a seat when travelling in a motor vehicle or the like. There is a similar awareness of the importance of safety in another area of activity involving the restriction of access of particular persons to an enclosed area via a gate, where the invention also has particular, but not exclusive, utility. In this area strict regulations have been introduced into society to ensure compliance with the installation and operation of latching mechanisms to prevent or limit the access of children to the area.
However, despite the best intentions of adults to whom such regulations are directed, where young children are involved who are not well equipped to understand issues of safety and adherence to regulations, extra vigilance is required by adults to monitor the activity of their children constantly and ascertain when a latching mechanism restraining a child or restricting access of a child to an area is released, thereby creating a dangerous situation for the child and potentially causing the adult to breach regulatory compliance requirements. Oftentimes the adult is unable to exercise this extra vigilance due to their requirement to focus on other activities from their own safety perspective and could benefit from some additional prompting.
For example, in the case of motor vehicle safety and seatbelt use, an adult driving a motor vehicle may not be able to monitor the latching status of seatbelts in the rear of the vehicle during driving. This may be despite the adult ensuring passengers in the rear are buckled up at the onset of the journey, and due to the attention required to focus on driving the vehicle safely and complying with road regulations. Hence, if a child finds occasion to release the latching mechanism of their seatbelt, even if intended only momentarily during the journey, the seatbelt may not be re-buckled due to the poor attention span of the child, exposing the child to a dangerous state if an accident was to occur.
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of motor vehicles have improved seatbelt monitoring systems over the years to address these safety requirements; however, it is only in recent times that these systems have been developed with enough sophistication to detect the latching status of seatbelts in the rear. One of the problems confronting designers in this area is that the rear seatbelts are not always used, and therefore relatively expensive sensing equipment is required to determine the presence of a passenger as well as the latching status of the belt itself to determine whether a seatbelt has become unbuckled during travel, exposing the passenger to a dangerous state.
These sophisticated systems generally entail the use of weight sensing devices integrated into the structure of the seat base and sense whether a person is seated in a particular seat before the latching status of the seatbelt for the seatbelt is monitored. These devices are bulky and expensive, and are impractical to retro-fit into vehicles that were not originally fitted with such sensing devices by the OEM.
Consequently, there are a large number of vehicles that do not have OEM designed rear seatbelt monitoring systems, or if they do, these devices are not adequate to provide the requisite level of monitoring required.
Some attempts have been made to develop retro-fitted monitoring and alert systems for rear seatbelts in the past, however, these systems have proven to be of inferior quality, suffering power failure, unreliable communication and flimsy design, allowing them to be relatively easily disassembled or bypassed.
Another example of latching mechanisms requiring monitoring of access to potentially dangerous areas are those fitted to gates of swimming pool enclosures. These gates involve a latching mechanism that is operated from an elevated position on the gate so as to be out of reach of children. However, given their industrious and innovative nature, children can often find ways of climbing up and operating the mechanism, allowing them access through the gate.
Presently there is no regulatory requirement to have a monitoring and alert system installed with these types of latching mechanisms and consequently virtually all swimming pool gates will rely simply on the physical operation of the latching mechanism to deter children from accessing swimming pool enclosures.
Clearly having regard to the above circumstances, there is a need for a well-designed and highly functional monitoring and alert system that is capable of being retro-fitted to sense the status of latching mechanisms such as rear seatbelts and gates for swimming pool enclosures that is not being met at the present time.